Page 93 of False Flag

It wasn’t the trees’ fault that they hid the history and prehistory that could be discovered only with an actual survey of the island. Satellite imagery and remote sensing couldn’t remove the trees to reveal the past because the property owner had a cybersecurity net of signal jammers that cloaked the island. It couldn’t be penetrated by technology that wasn’t logged in to the hardwire system that was configured to send and receive data packets in seemingly random microsecond gaps that had proven impossible to hack.

Staci studied the coastline of the malevolent landmass, easily identifying the bands of white that dotted the wave-cut banks. Those bands were shell fragments. The horizontal layers of white separated by thin black and brown stripes were archaeological sites the trees—and Osborne—couldn’t hide.

The shells might have accumulated over thousands of years, or represent a few seasons, but there was no denying they were shell middens. Shell was an excellent preservative—it neutralized the acidity in the soil, meaning charcoal and bone survived for thousands of years.

Radiocarbon dates for one of the Pacific Northwest’s most analyzed shell midden sites—the West Point Sewage Treatment Plant located in Discovery Park in Seattle—revealed that the site was over four thousand years old.

If Staci could convince Osborne to let her take carbon samples from Letora’s shoreline middens, she would be able to show that First Nations had occupied the island prior to 1492. Probably prior to 1000 BCE—Before Common Era.

Not that Osborne would care about a prehistoric site attributed to Indigenous Canadians. No, he was a believer in Mu. Not that Mu was here, per se, but that when Mu collapsed into the Pacific, refugees from that apocalypse fled to British Columbia and established an agricultural society—which in itself was ridiculous, because these islands and waters offered such abundance that it was a rare prehistoric example of a complex society that was not based on agriculture—and then Mu’s farmers encountered their second apocalypse when Indigenous people invaded from Asia and committed genocide.

This was the theory Gerard wanted to prove and Staci needed to dismantle. Her job wouldn’t be hard if she wasn’t being hampered by that same cybersecurity shield that isolated the land.

“I’m going to circle the island,” Jake said, turning away from the harbor with the only dock.

Staci grabbed the high-powered binoculars with built-in camera. “I’ll snap photos of all the visible structures.”

It only took seven minutes before a boat attempted to prevent them from circumnavigating the island. It came as no surprise to Staci that Beau was on the security boat and calling the shots—via bullhorn.

Jake didn’t bother putting on a show of sound. He didn’t even shout as he responded. “We’re within our legal rights. Osborne does not own the water below the high-water mark. The Crown does. We are well outside the high-water line and Osborne’s domain.”

A screech sounded as Beau proved he didn’t know how to use the bullhorn properly. “You’re spying on Osborne’s land in violation of the NDA.”

“Did you sign an NDA?” Staci whispered without moving her lips.

“No. I wasn’t hired, there was no paperwork prepared for my role, just a verbal volunteer agreement that didn’t cover the island or Osborne. We were supposed to hammer out the details for a signed document after that first dive.”

“Good.” She raised her voice. “I’m ground-truthing the report Casper provided.” She used the billionaire’s first name because Beau didn’t. He probably was required to keep his head bowed around the big man, like a servant of royalty. “This is my job. Which you are now interfering with.”

“Did he instruct you to do this work?”

“I’m sure he doesn’t have the slightest idea of what my work entails. He’s not involved in the minutiae. Last I heard, he’s got about seven other businesses to run. Now, get out of our way so I can finish.”

Beau was clearly frustrated, having assumed she’d be cowed like she was on land when she was rebuffed from exploring the woods. But that was Osborne’s property. The water was not.

When the other vessel showed no sign of moving, Jake put Rosalie in reverse.

The other boat, captained by an unknown minion, lurched forward, as if to ram Rosalie.

Jake let out a sigh and put the boat in neutral. “I’m an officer in the US Navy. I know the laws in Canada and the US, and we are within them. Don’t fuck with me unless you’re prepared to explain to your boss why you caused an international incident right outside his private residence that he absolutely doesn’t want news cameras to be focused on from this legally accessible vantage point.”

Without a word, the other vessel reversed and swung around. Staci assumed they would return to the dock, but instead, it dropped back and followed them at stalker speed as they circled the island.

“I’d question your taste in men,” Jake murmured, “but you like me, so I figure I shouldn’t go there.”

She gave him a twisted smile. “Good call. In my defense, this isn’t who he was when I first knew him, and then later, he hid this part of himself.”

“Lloyd was different in his late teens and early twenties too.”

“The more I study disinformation and how it’s packaged as entertainment, which is then wrapped in a conspiracy and weaponized, the more I think maybe the internet was a mistake.”

She sighed. “A hundred years ago, the Native Sons of British Columbia had to work to find an audience. I haven’t done a deep dive yet, but I’ve only been able to find a handful of contemporaneous newspaper articles about them. Compared to now, when we get ten conspiracies an hour, amplified by bots, they go viral as they’re boosted by scammers from Nigeria pretending to be Americans ‘just asking questions’ to spark fear and outrage.”

He snickered. “So you want to ban the internet?”

“I mean, not really. But sometimes I think of the stories my stepmom shared about what it was like when you had to go to libraries and read newspapers for information. When I lived with her, she still had her parents’ 1970s World Book Encyclopedia set. She’d kept it because she’d loved browsing the pages when she was a kid, and it became one of my favorite things to do when I was in middle school. There was just so much…everything. And I could just flip through it at random and learn things. If I had a set with me now, I’d look up geoducks—which I don’t think I’d ever heard of before—and then probably find myself on a geode tangent. Plus, the science in the World Book was referenced. It was a starting point, not an endpoint for learning. And in all my browsing of those books I might find something that was later proven to be incorrect, but I’d never trip over an article that was an intentional scam by the content creator. Or not written by a human. Or that wanted to radicalize me. Or deny the holocaust.”

“It really sucks that something that makes communication and information so much easier also poisons both.”